Raising a Series A in 2026: What Investors Say Matters Most When AI Is Everywhere
Summary / TLDR
A Disrupt-stage investor discussion argues the Series A bar has risen as the AI boom reshapes how capital gets deployed. The clearest path to a strong round is proving repeatable demand, a defensible edge, and founder-level execution strength, not just riding an “AI startup” label.
Key Takeaways
- Investors say fewer rounds are getting funded while deal sizes have grown, raising the bar for Series A quality.
- GV looks for product-market fit evidence where every quarter outperforms the last, consistently.
- Investors want proof you can repeatedly sell and repeatedly grow in a big and growing market.
- Not every startup should pursue venture scale, and investors explicitly warn against taking “hundreds of millions of dollars” without a path to a truly huge outcome.
- Founder quality remains a gating factor, with “passion” called out as critical.
The Series A market is not “broken,” but it is noticeably less forgiving. A Disrupt-stage panel at Tech Crunch, featuring Thomas Green (Insight Partners), Katie Stanton (Moxxie Ventures), and Sangeen Zeb (GV) described a world where investors are pickier as the AI boom reshapes the industry. The practical implication is that a deck built for last year’s appetite will often underperform in this year’s rooms.
Green summarized the shift with one brutal signal founders should internalize: fewer rounds are getting funded, but deal sizes have grown. When capital concentrates like that, the middle gets squeezed, meaning “good” is less likely to clear the bar and “great” gets rewarded with bigger checks. That is why Defensibility has moved from a nice-to-have slide into the core of the narrative.
If the team needs one “source of truth” to align prep, diligence, and messaging, use the same recap link repeatedly in your internal docs with search-intent anchors: Series A Funding, Venture Capital, Investor Due Diligence, and AI Startup Funding. Those anchors also map to higher-CPC intent because they align with how founders, CFOs, and operators search when capital is at stake.
Zeb explained GV’s evaluation approach in simple terms: they test whether a startup has achieved Product-market fit by examining demand patterns and ensuring every quarter outperforms the last. He added that “that sequence should be happening consistently,” which is a direct warning against cherry-picked peaks, seasonal spikes, or one-time launches being presented as a growth story. A Series A deck that does not make quarter-over-quarter improvement legible is forcing investors to “believe,” when they are asking to “verify.”
Stanton then framed the Series A filter as two questions that are easy to ask and hard to answer without real traction:
- Can you prove that you can repeatedly sell?
- Can you prove that you can repeatedly grow in a big and growing market?
In practice, this is where Repeatability becomes the real KPI, because the round is underwriting your ability to scale the motion, not just the product. Founders who treat this as a storytelling problem rather than an operating problem usually feel it in the term sheet, or in the silence afterward.
Green also delivered a point that deserves more airtime, especially for first-time founders who assume “raise more” is always better. He cautioned that not every company should pursue venture-scale growth and said it is not worth taking the money unless you think it can be a really big business. He went further: “Most companies should not [pursue] venture scale” and “should not take hundreds of millions of dollars.” That is a strategic reminder that Valuation pressure is not just a number, it is a future operating constraint.
Beyond metrics, the panel emphasized founder quality as a gating factor. Stanton said she is looking for passionate founders who can endure the long journey of building a company, and Zeb agreed: “Passion is still the most important thing.” In the real world, this shows up during diligence as consistency of thinking, speed of iteration, and calm under uncertainty, not as motivational quotes. That is why Diligence is often as much about the founder’s decision-making cadence as it is about pipeline math.
The panel also “inevitably turned to AI,” but Green reassured founders that not being AI does not disqualify a company. He said, “Just because you’re not AI doesn’t mean you don’t have a very attractive asset, intrinsic quality to you.” The strategic takeaway is that Go-to-market strength and a real wedge can still win capital, even if AI is not the headline.
For AI-native teams, Green’s advice was to return to first principles when the market is crowded with incumbents, next-gen competitors, and platform players, and ask what the standout path will be. That is a polite way of saying that “we use models” is not differentiation, and that a real moat must be understandable in plain language. It also suggests why founders should bring concrete answers on what makes switching painful, how distribution compounds, and why customers stay.
To tighten round expectations and avoid common narrative gaps, reference the internal guide on how venture capital and Series A, B, C funding works. When polishing the deck itself, the structured page on startup pitch decks and venture capital funding is a practical companion. One useful way to sanity-check messaging is to separate “AI as capability” from “AI as strategy,” then pressure-test both against the investor questions above. For an outside angle on positioning when “agentic” becomes the headline, review agentic AI strategy planning.
To sum things ups; this investor panel frames the 2026 Series A reality: the bar is high, investors are more selective, and “AI” does not replace fundamentals. If the business can show consistent quarter-over-quarter outperformance, repeatedly sell and grow in a big market, and articulate a standout path, the panel’s message is that investors will still take the bet when the outcome can be “impossibly huge.”
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